2061: Odyssey Three (7 page)

Captain Smith had raised surprisingly few objections to the idea of passenger EVAs. He agreed that to have come all this way, and not to set foot upon the comet, was absurd.

‘There’ll be no problems if you follow instructions,’ he said at the inevitable briefing. ‘Even if you’ve never worn spacesuits before - and I believe that only Commander Greenburg and Dr Floyd have done so - they’re quite comfortable, and fully automatic. There’s no need to bother about any controls or adjustments, after you’ve been checked out in the airlock.

‘One absolute rule: only two of you can go EVA at one time. You’ll have a personal escort, of course, linked to you by five metres of safety line - though that can be played out to twenty if necessary. In addition, you’ll both be tethered to the two guide-cables we’ve strung the whole length of the valley. The rule of the road is the same as on Earth; keep to the right! If you want to overtake anyone, you only have to unclip your buckle - but one of you must always remain attached to the line. That way, there’s no danger of drifting off into space. Any questions?’

‘How long can we stay out?’

‘As long as you like, Ms M’Bala. But I recommend that you return just as soon as you feel the slightest discomfort. Perhaps an hour would be best for the first outing - though it may seem like only ten minutes…’

Captain Smith had been quite correct. As Heywood Floyd looked at his time-elapsed display, it seemed incredible that forty minutes had already passed. Yet it should not have been so surprising, for the ship was already a good kilometre away.

As the senior passenger - by almost any reckoning - he had been given the privilege of making the first EVA. And he really had no choice of companion.

‘EVA with Yva!’ chortled Mihailovich. ‘How can you possibly resist! Even if,’ he added with a lewd grin, ‘those damn suits won’t let you try all the Extravehicular Activities you’d like,’

Yva had agreed, without any hesitation, yet also without any enthusiasm. That, Floyd thought wryly, was typical. It would not be quite true to say that he was disillusioned - at his age, he had very few illusions left - but he was disappointed. And with himself rather than Yva; she was as beyond criticism or praise as the Mona Lisa - with whom she had often been compared.

The comparison was, of course, ridiculous; La Gioconda was mysterious, but she was certainly not erotic. Yva’s power had lain in her unique combination of both - with innocence thrown in for good measure. Half a century later, traces of all three ingredients were still visible, at least to the eye of faith.

What was lacking - as Floyd had been sadly forced to admit - was any real personality. When he tried to focus his mind upon her, all he could visualize were the roles she had played. He would have reluctantly agreed with the critic who had once said:

‘Yva Merlin is the reflection of all men’s desires; but a mirror has no character.’

And now this unique and mysterious creature was floating beside him across the face of Halley’s Comet, as they and their guide moved along the twin cables that spanned the Valley of Black Snow. That was his name; he was childishly proud of it, even though it would never appear on any map. There could be no maps of a world where geography was as ephemeral as weather on Earth. He savoured the knowledge that no human eye had ever before looked upon the scene around him - or ever would again.

On Mars, or on the Moon, you could sometimes -with a slight effort of imagination, and if you ignored the alien sky - pretend that you were on Earth. This was impossible here, because the towering - often overhanging - snow sculptures showed only the slightest concession to gravity. You had to look very carefully at your surroundings to decide which way was up.

The Valley of Black Snow was unusual, because it was a fairly solid structure - a rocky reef embedded in volatile drifts of water and hydrocarbon ice. The geologists were still arguing about its origin, some maintaining that it was really part of an asteroid that had encountered the comet ages ago. Corings had revealed complex mixtures of organic compounds, rather like frozen coal-tar - though it was certain that life had never played any part in their formation.

The ’snow’ carpeting of the floor of the little valley was not completely black; when Floyd raked it with the beam of his flashlight it glittered and sparkled as if embedded with a million microscopic diamonds. He wondered if there were indeed diamonds on Halley: there was certainly enough carbon here. But it was almost equally certain that the temperatures and pressures necessary to create them had never existed here.

On a sudden impulse, Floyd reached down and gathered two handfuls of the snow: he had to push with his feet against the safety line to do so, and had a comic vision of himself as a trapeze artist walking a tightrope - but upside down. The fragile crust offered virtually no resistance as he buried head and shoulders into it; then he pulled gently on his tether and emerged with his handful of Halley.

He wished that he could feel it through the insulation of his gloves, as he compacted the mass of crystalline fluff into a ball that just fitted the palm of his hand. There it lay, ebony black yet giving fugitive flashes of light as he turned it from side to side.

And suddenly, in his imagination, it became the purest white - and he was a boy again, in the winter playground of his youth, surrounded with the ghosts of his childhood. He could even hear the cries of his companions, taunting and threatening him with their own projectiles of immaculate snow…

The memory was brief, but shattering, for it brought an overwhelming sensation of sadness. Across a century of time, he could no longer remember a single one of those phantom friends who stood around him; yet some, he knew, he had once loved…

His eyes filled with tears, and his fingers clenched around the ball of alien snow. Then the vision faded; he was himself again. This was not a moment of sadness, but of triumph.

‘My God!’ cried Heywood Floyd, his words echoing in the tiny, reverberant universe of his spacesuit, ‘I’m standing on Halley’s Comet - what more do I want! If a meteor hits me now, I won’t have a single complaint!’

He brought up his arms and launched the snowball towards the stars. It was so small, and so dark, that it vanished almost at once, but he kept on staring into the sky.

And then, abruptly - unexpectedly - it appeared in a sudden explosion of light, as it rose into the rays of the hidden Sun. Black as soot though it was, it reflected enough of that blinding brilliance to be easily visible against the faintly luminous sky.

Floyd watched it until it finally disappeared - perhaps by evaporation, perhaps by dwindling into the distance. It would not last long in the fierce torrent of radiation overhead; but how many men could claim to have created a comet of their own?

The cautious exploration of the comet had already begun while Universe still remained in the polar shadow. First, one-man EMUs (few people now knew that stood for External Manoeuvring Unit) gently jetted over both day- and nightside, recording everything of interest. Once the preliminary surveys had been completed, groups of up to five scientists flew out in the onboard shuttle, deploying equipment and instruments at strategic spots.

The Lady Jasmine was a far cry from the primitive ’space pods’ of the Discovery era, capable of operating only in a gravity-free environment. She was virtually a small spaceship, designed to ferry personnel and light cargo between the orbiting Universe and the surfaces of Mars, Moon, or the Jovian satellites. Her chief pilot, who treated her like the grande dame she was, complained with mock bitterness that flying round a miserable little comet was far beneath her dignity.

When he was quite sure that Halley - on the surface at least - held no surprises, Captain Smith lifted away from the pole. Moving less than a dozen kilometres took Universe to a different world, from a glimmering twilight that would last for months to a realm that knew the cycle of night and day. And with the dawn, the comet came slowly to life.

As the Sun crept above the jagged, absurdly close horizon, its rays would slant down into the countless small craters that pockmarked the crust. Most of them would remain inactive, their narrow throats sealed by incrustations of mineral salts. Nowhere else on Halley were such vivid displays of colour; they had misled biologists into thinking that here life was beginning, as it had on Earth, in the form of algal growths. Many had not yet abandoned that hope, though they would be reluctant to admit it.

From other craters, wisps of vapour floated up into the sky, moving in unnaturally straight trajectories because there were no winds to divert them. Usually nothing else happened for an hour or two; then, as the Sun’s warmth penetrated to the frozen interior, Halley would begin to spurt - as Victor Willis had put it ‘like a pod of whales’.

Though picturesque, it was not one of his more accurate metaphors. The jets from the dayside of Halley were not intermittent, but played steadily for hours at a time. And they did not curl over and fall back to the surface, but went rising on up into the sky, until they were lost in the glowing fog which they helped create.

At first, the science team treated the geysers as cautiously as if they were vulcanologists approaching Etna or Vesuvius in one of their less predictable moods. But they soon discovered that Halley’s eruptions, though often fearsome in appearance, were singularly gentle and well-behaved; the water emerged about as fast as from an ordinary firehose, and was barely warm. Within seconds of escaping from its underground reservoir, it would flash into a mixture of vapour and ice crystals; Halley was enveloped in a perpetual snowstorm, falling upwards… Even at this modest speed of ejection, none of the water would ever return to its source. Each time it rounded the Sun, more of the comet’s life-blood would haemorrhage into the insatiable vacuum of space.

After considerable persuasion, Captain Smith agreed to move Universe to within a hundred metres of ‘Old Faithful’, the largest geyser on the dayside. It was an awesome sight - a whitish-grey column of mist, growing like some giant tree from a surprisingly small orifice in a three-hundred-metre-wide crater which appeared to be one of the oldest formations on the comet. Before long, the scientists were scrambling all over the crater, collecting specimens of its (completely sterile, alas) multi-coloured minerals, and casually thrusting their thermometers and sampling tubes into the soaring water-ice-mist column itself. ‘If it tosses any of you out into space,’ warned the Captain, ‘don’t expect to be rescued in a hurry. In fact, we may just wait until you come back.’

‘What does he mean by that?’ a puzzled Dimitri Mihailovich had asked. As usual, Victor Willis was quick with the answer.

‘Things don’t always happen the way you’d expect in celestial mechanics. Anything thrown off Halley at a reasonable speed will still be moving in essentially the same orbit - it takes a huge velocity change to make a big differenc. So one revolution later, the two orbits will intersect again - and you’ll be right back where you started. Seventy-six years older, of course.’

Not far from Old Faithful was another phenomenon which no-one could reasonably have anticipated. When they first observed it, the scientists could scarcely believe their eyes. Spread out across several hectares of Halley, exposed to the vacuum of space, was what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary lake, remarkable only for its extreme blackness.

Obviously, it could not be water; the only liquids which could be stable in this environment were heavy organic oils or tars. In fact, ‘Lake Tuonela’ turned out to be more like pitch, quite solid except for a sticky surface layer less than a millimetre thick. In this negligible gravity, it must have taken years - perhaps several trips round the warming fires of the Sun - for it to have assumed its present mirror-flatness.

Until the Captain put a stop to it, the lake became one of the principal tourist attractions on Halley’s Comet. Someone (nobody claimed the dubious honour) discovered that it was possible to walk perfectly normally across it, almost as if on Earth; the surface film had just enough adhesion to hold the foot in place. Before long, most of the crew had got themselves videoed apparently walking on water…

Then Captain Smith inspected the airlock, discovered the walls liberally stained with tar, and gave the nearest thing to a display of anger that anyone had ever witnessed from him.

‘It’s bad enough,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘having the outside of the ship coated with - soot. Halley’s Comet is about the filthiest place I’ve ever seen…’

After that, there were no more strolls on Lake Tuonela.

In a small, self-contained universe where everyone knows everyone else, there can be no greater shock than encountering a total stranger.

Heywood Floyd was floating gently along the corridor to the main lounge when he had this disturbing experience. He stared in amazement at the interloper, wondering how a stowaway had managed to avoid detection for so long. The other man looked back at him with a combination of embarrassment and bravado, obviously waiting for Floyd to speak first.

‘Well, Victor!’ he said at last. ‘Sorry I didn’t recognize you. So you’ve made the supreme sacrifice, for the cause of science - or should I say your public?’

‘Yes,’ Willis answered grumpily. ‘I did manage to squeeze into one helmet - but the damn bristles made so many scratching noises no-one could hear a word I said.’

‘When are you going out?’

‘Just as soon as Cliff comes back - he’s gone caving with Bill Chant.’

The first flybys of the comet, in 1986, had suggested that it was considerably less dense than water -which could only mean that it was either made of very porous material, or was riddled with cavities. Both explanations turned out to be correct.

At first, the ever-cautious Captain Smith flatly forbade any cave-exploring. He finally relented when Dr Pendrill reminded him that his chief assistant Dr Chant was an experienced speleologist - indeed, that was one of the very reasons he had been chosen for the mission.

‘Cave-ins are impossible, in this low gravity,’ Pendrill had told the reluctant Captain. ‘So there’s no danger of being trapped.’

‘What about being lost?’

‘Chant would regard that suggestion as a professional insult. He’s been twenty kilometres inside Mammoth Cave. Anyway, he’ll play out a guideline.’

‘Communications?’

‘The line’s got fibre optics in it. And his suit radio will probably work most of the way.’

‘Umm. Where does he want to go in?’

‘The best place is that extinct geyser at the base of Etna Junior. It’s been dead for at least a thousand years.’

‘So I suppose it should keep quiet for another couple of days. Very well - does anyone else want to go?’

‘Cliff Greenburg has volunteered - he’s done a good deal of underwater cave-exploring, in the Bahamas.’

‘I tried it once - that was enough. Tell Cliff he’s much too valuable. He can go in as far as he can still see the entrance - and no further. And if he loses contact with Chant, he’s not to go after him, without my authority.’

Which, the Captain added to himself, I would be very reluctant to give…

Dr Chant knew all the old jokes about speleologists wanting to return to the womb, and was quite sure he could refute them.

‘That must be a damn noisy place, with all its thumpings and bumpings and gurglings,’ he argued. ‘I love caves because they’re so peaceful and timeless. You know that nothing has changed for a hundred thousand years, except that the stalactites have grown a bit thicker.’

But now, as he drifted deeper into Halley, playing out the thin, but virtually unbreakable thread that linked him to Clifford Greenburg, he realized that this was no longer true. As yet, he had no scientific proof, but his geologist’s instincts told him that this subterranean world had been born only yesterday, on the time-scale of the Universe. It was younger than some of the cities of man.

The tunnel through which he was gliding in long, shallow leaps was about four metres in diameter, and his virtual weightlessness brought back vivid memories of cave-diving on Earth. The low gravity contributed to the illusion; it was exactly as if he was carrying slightly too much weight, and so kept drifting gently downwards. Only the absence of all resistance reminded him that he was moving through vacuum, not water.

‘You’re just getting out of sight,’ said Greenburg, fifty metres in from the entrance. ‘Radio link still fine. What’s the scenery like?’

‘Very hard to say - I can’t identify any formations, so I don’t have the vocabulary to describe them. It’s not any kind of rock - it crumbles when I touch it - I feel as if I’m exploring a giant Gruyère cheese.’

‘You mean it’s organic?’

‘Yes - nothing to do with life, of course - but perfect raw material for it. All sorts of hydrocarbons - the chemists will have fun with these samples. Can you still see me?’

‘Only the glow of your light, and that’s fading fast.’

‘Ah - here’s some genuine rock - doesn’t look as if it belongs here - probably an intrusion - ah - I’ve struck gold!’

‘You’re joking!’

‘It fooled a lot of people in the old West - iron pyrites. Common on the outer satellites, of course, but don’t ask me what it’s doing here…’

‘Visual contact lost. You’re two hundred metres in.’

‘I’m passing through a distinct layer - looks like meteoric debris - something exciting must have happened back then - I hope we can date it - wow!’

‘Don’t do that sort of thing to me!’

‘Sorry - quite took my breath away - there’s a big chamber ahead - last thing I expected - let me swing the beam around…

‘Almost spherical - thirty, forty metres across. And - I don’t believe it - Halley is full of surprises - stalactites, stalagmites.’

‘What’s so surprising about that?’

‘No free water, no limestone here, of course - and such low gravity. Looks like some kind of wax. Just a minute while I get good video coverage… fantastic shapes… sort of thing a dripping candle makes… that’s odd…’

‘Now what?’

Dr Chant’s voice had shown a sudden alteration in tone, which Greenburg had instantly detected.

‘Some of the columns have been broken. They’re lying on the floor. It’s almost as if…’

‘Go on!’

‘… as if something has - blundered - into them.’

‘That’s crazy. Could an earthquake have snapped them?’

‘No earthquakes here - only microseisms from the geysers. Perhaps there was a big blow-out at some time. Anyway, it was centuries ago. There’s a film of this wax stuff over the fallen columns - several millimetres thick.’

Dr Chant was slowly recovering his composure. He was not a highly imaginative man - spelunking eliminates such men rather quickly - but the very feel of the place had triggered some disturbing memory. And those fallen columns looked altogether too much like the bars of a cage, broken by some monster in an attempt to escape.

Of course, that was perfectly absurd - but Dr Chant had learned never to ignore any premonition, any danger signal, until he had traced it to its origin. That caution had saved his life more than once; he would not go beyond this chamber until he had identified the source of his fear. And he was honest enough to admit that ‘fear’ was the correct word.

‘Bill - are you all right? What’s happening?’

‘Still filming. Some of these shapes remind me of Indian temple sculpture. Almost erotic.’

He was deliberately turning his mind away from the direct confrontation of his fears, hoping thereby to sneak up on them unawares, by a kind of averted mental vision. Meanwhile the purely mechanical acts of recording and collecting samples occupied most of his attention.

There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, with healthy fear; only when it escalated into panic did it become a killer. He had known panic twice in his life (once on a mountainside, once underwater) and still shuddered at the memory of its clammy touch. Yet - thankfully - he was far from it now, and for a reason which, though he did not understand it, he found curiously reassuring. There was an element of comedy in the situation.

And presently he started to laugh - not with hysteria, but with relief.

‘Did you ever see those old Star Wars movies?’ he asked Greenburg.

‘Of course - half a dozen times.’

‘Well, I know what’s been bothering me. There was a sequence when Luke’s spaceship dives into an asteroid - and runs into a gigantic snake-creature that lurks inside its caverns.’

‘Not Luke’s ship - Hans Solo’s Millennium Falcon. And I always wondered how that poor beast managed to eke out a living. It must have grown very hungry, waiting for the occasional titbit from space. And Princess Leia wouldn’t have been more than an hors-d’oeuvre, anyway.’

‘Which I certainly don’t intend to provide,’ said Dr Chant, now completely at ease. ‘Even if there is life here - which would be marvellous - the food chain would be very short. So I’d be surprised to find anything bigger than a mouse. Or, more likely, a mushroom… Now let’s see - where do we go from here… There are two exits on the other side of the chamber… the one on the right is bigger… I’ll take that…’

‘How much more line have you got?’

‘Oh, a good half-kilometre. Here we go… I’m in the middle of the chamber… damn, bounced off the wall… now I’ve got a hand-hold… going in head-first… smooth walls, real rock for a change… that’s a pity..

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Can’t go any further. More stalactites… too close together for me to get through… and too thick to break without explosives. And that would be a shame… the colours are beautiful… first real greens and blues I’ve seen on Halley. Just a minute while I get them on video…

Dr Chant braced himself against the wall of the narrow tunnel, and aimed the camera. With his gloved fingers be reached for the HI-INTENSITY switch, but missed it and cut off the main lights completely.

‘Lousy design,’ he muttered. ‘Third time I’ve done that.’

He did not immediately correct his mistake, because he had always enjoyed that silence and total darkness which can be experienced only in the deepest caves. The gentle background noises of his life-support equipment robbed him of the silence, but at least…

What was that? From beyond the portcullis of stalactites blocking further progress he could see a faint glow, like the first light of dawn. As his eyes grew adapted to the darkness, it appeared to grow brighter, and he could detect a hint of green. Now he could even see the outlines of the barrier ahead.

‘What’s happening?’ said Greenburg anxiously.

‘Nothing - just observing.’

And thinking, he might have added. There were four possible explanations.

Sunlight could be filtering down through some natural light duct - ice, crystal, whatever. But at this depth? Unlikely.

Radioactivity? He hadn’t bothered to bring a counter; there were virtually no heavy elements here. But it would be worth coming back to check.

Some phosphorescent mineral - that was the one he’d put his money on. But there was a fourth possibility - the most unlikely, and most exciting, of all.

Dr Chant had never forgotten a moonless - and Luciferless - night on the shores of the Indian Ocean, when he had been walking beneath brilliant stars along a sandy beach. The sea was very calm, but from time to time a languid wave would collapse at his feet - and detonate in an explosion of light.

He had walked out into the shallows (he could still remember the feel of the water round his ankles, like a warm bath) and with every step he took there had been another burst of light. He could even trigger it by clapping his hands close to the surface.

Could similar bioluminescent organisms have evolved, here in the heart of Halley’s Comet? He would love to think so. It seemed a pity to vandalize something so exquisite as this natural work of art - with the glow behind it, the barrier now reminded him of an altar screen he had once seen in some cathedral - but he would have to go back and get some explosives. Meanwhile, there was the other corridor…

‘I can’t get any further along this route,’ he told Greenburg, ’so I’ll try the other. Coming back to the junction - setting the reel on rewind.’ He did not mention the mysterious glow, which had vanished as soon as he switched on his lights again.

Greenburg did not reply immediately, which was unusual; probably he was talking to the ship. Chant did not worry; he would repeat his message as soon as he had got under way again.

He did not bother, because there was a brief acknowledgement from Greenburg.

‘Fine, Cliff - thought I’d lost you for a minute. Back at the chamber - now going into the other tunnel - hope there’s nothing blocking that.’

This time, Greenburg replied at once.

‘Sorry, Bill. Come back to the ship. There’s an emergency - no, not here - everything’s fine with Universe. But we may have to return to Earth at once.’

It was only a few weeks before Dr Chant discovered a very plausible explanation for the broken columns. As the comet blasted its substance away into space at each perihelion passage, its mass distribution continually altered. And so, every few thousand years, its spin became unstable, and it would change the direction of its axis - quite violently, like a top that is about to fall over as it loses energy. When that occurred, the resulting cometquake could reach a respectable five on the Richter scale.

But he never solved the mystery of the luminous glow. Though the problem was swiftly overshadowed by the drama that was now unfolding, the sense of a missed opportunity would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Though he was occasionally tempted, he never mentioned it to any of his colleagues. But he did leave a sealed note for the next expedition, to be opened in 2133.